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Pen Still Mightier Than the Laptop For Notetaking?
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Feb 07, 2010 04:31 PM
from the highly-evolved-metaphor dept.
from the highly-evolved-metaphor dept.
theodp writes "While waiting to see if the iPad is a game-changer, this CS student continues to take class notes with pen and paper while her fellow students embrace netbooks and notebooks. Why? In addition to finding the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in her mind, there's also the problem of keeping up with the professor: '[While taking notes on a laptop] every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.' So, when it comes to education or business, do you take notes on a notepad/netbook, or stick with good old-fashioned handwriting? Got any tips for making the transition, or arguments for staying the course?"
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News: Professors Banning Laptops In the Lecture Hall 664 comments
Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that professors have banned laptops from their classrooms at George Washington University, American University, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Virginia, among many others, compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper. A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen, but during the past decade it has evolved into a powerful distraction as wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming. Even when used as glorified typewriters, laptops can turn students into witless stenographers, typing a lecture verbatim without listening or understanding. 'The breaking point for me was when I asked a student to comment on an issue, and he said, "Wait a minute, I want to open my computer,"' says David Goldfrank, a Georgetown history professor. 'And I told him, "I don't want to know what's in your computer. I want to know what's in your head."' Some students don't agree with the ban. A student wrote in the University of Denver's newspaper: 'The fact that some students misuse technology is no reason to ban it. After all, how many professors ban pens and notebooks after noticing students doodling in the margins?'"
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Notes (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking notes on notepad/netbook is an extremely good idea, and now with WiFi's and 3G's everywhere, you can also chat, email, post insightful posts to slashdot, and go raid in World of Warcraft all at the same time. It also lets you work on your latest coding project or post updates to facebook and twitter. If you're getting hungry towards end of the class, you can just use Google Maps to search for some good pizza joint nearby.
Oh notes.. "what notes? I was a little bit busy online..."
But what does iPad have to do with this? Even if we ignore the fact that iPad doesn't even have a stylus, writing with such is laggy and just messes up the text. You write a lot better on paper. The technology isn't there just yet.
And then theres the thing that with your written notes you're more likely to actually read them again. Write them on computer and you just shove them to some obscure location and never read them again.
Re:Notes (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Notes (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Notes (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Notes (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Notes (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Train Your Hand / Arm Muscles (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I graduated some years back, I still advocate the use of pen and paper to students because of final exams. You are going to be sitting in the gymnasiums writing 15 hours of exams in the space of a few days. By hand. On paper.
If you haven't been training up your hand all semester, your arm is going to break down after about 20 minutes because your muscles are not used to manual writing. Good luck being effective on your exams when your wrist is about to fall off.
I experienced this a couple of years out of school when I chose to write the Professional Practice Exam [peo.on.ca]. About 45 minutes into the three hour exam in the freezing cold gym at University of Toronto, I just about gnawed my hand off.
Parent
Re:Train Your Hand / Arm Muscles (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's not just me... I returned to school after graduating a decade previous in order to brush up on newer technologies. (Working while taking classes part-time). Luckily, as it was a computer class, the lecturer would put up his presentations before the class so we could download them to our laptops and follow along. The need to draw diagrams was removed, and I could just edit the documents with details of in-class discussions, so the need to hand write was not an issue. Since it was a project class, there was no mid-term.
HOWEVER, when I went to write the final, my hand quickly became the claw about 30 minutes in. I had not only avoided handwriting in class, I haven't hand written more than a sketch in 10 years. (I type 100+ wpm and actually type faster than I can write. Why would I?) I finished the exam in so much pain.
I got 100% on the part of the exam I completed. However, I was only able to complete 80% of the exam due to severe pain in my writing hand, resulting in a mark that was not a fair representation of my knowledge. It's frustrating knowing that if I had been able to type or orally provide my answers, I would've easily been in the top percentile. (10 years of industry experience being very helpful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You don't have to "buy" it, it's true [lifehack.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(The author of the article does touch upon "pen vs keyboard" in the comments, but he says: "I didn’t come across anything on typing, but I would guess it would have the same effect.")
Re:Predictive handwriting (Score:5, Funny)
I'm working on integrating my handwriting with T9 for notetaking purposes.
How does that work? You write "tgd ppmgpam" on a piece of paper when you're making a note on "the program"?
Parent
At Law School... (Score:5, Insightful)
At law school, everyone uses laptops. It's a different world than the world of pen and paper. There are a very few students who still take notes the old-fashioned way, and they do remarkably well sometimes, but the simple fact is that when you have a particularly intense class you can get down a lot more information typing than you can with pen and paper.
You still have to be disciplined--turning off your network devices can be helpful, and you also have to avoid taking notes just because everyone else is. (There are times when one person starts typing, then another, and it snowballs, even when there's nothing noteworthy being discussed.) But if you use the laptop as a tool, it's a very effective one. It also lets you learn a bit more, because you can actually do some outside research during class which enriches it for everyone.
Parent
Re:At Law School... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could see this working in law school; you probably don't have the sorts of complex equations and diagrams that students are likely to see in science, math & engineering.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Re:At Law School... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, this sort of thing is why pen & paper can still beat a laptop. If you're just jotting down some ideas or writing out a linear outline, then laptops can be good, especially considering that a lot of people under 30 write pretty slowly by hand and can type relatively quickly. However, if your notes contain a lot of mathematical symbols or technical diagrams, those things can be hard to input quickly with a keyboard and mouse.
And even if your notes don't need symbols, typing notes can get wonky, depending on the subject and what kind of note-taker you are. In my notes, you always see things scrawled all over the page, laid out in a web with some things circled and big arrows drawn all over the place. Sometimes it also helps me concentrate if I can doodle (I don't know why). Back in college I learned that if I really wanted to learn something, I had to take notes by hand, and then go back and organize my notes in a more linear way and type them up. That's my general recommendation on how to handle things, but different people are different and YMMV.
Some of it may be helped by something with a touchscreen and stylus, but I'm not sure pen and paper aren't still superior.
Parent
Missed market (Score:3, Insightful)
For all of the hype and drama surrounding the ipad and Kindle, there's been a pretty big missed market.
I would pay a _lot_ of money for a 8.5x11" screen that had enough resolution to behave like my old gridded engineering paper. I can't back up engineering paper, and I can't take it around with me easily. I go through about ~1000 sheets/year, and have several boxes of notes I'd love to have with me. In university, a decade ago, I'd take notes and scan them after - that worked, ok. Enough of a pain I don't
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not simply take a picture of the diagrams and embed them with the notes later?
Re:At Law School... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you may get more "information," typing down, but I feel like in actuality most students typing notes are acting more like stenographers than note takers. They don't process anything they hear, they just copy it down verbatim. Writing by hand, I have to measure what is being said, digest it to some degree, and then write down the important part. Occasionally I miss something, when the professor is going a mile a minute, but I have never had a problem going up to the professor after the class and asking about what I missed.
This would be more difficult if I didn't do the homework (another reason why so many students take notes on their laptop, I think), but since I usually do, I have an idea of what the cases are about and usually have highlighted important parts of the case. More often than not, my pre-class notes in the case are what the professor touches on anyway, so I just have to underline (I use a red pen in class, black or blue for pre-class notes, and various color highlighting for parts of the case before class) things I have already read, noted, and highlighted.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
End result, you may very well have gotten more information total, but it'
Re:Are you guys mad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't your mobile phones take videos? Record the lecture. Take photos of the diagrams. Narrate your own thoughts and comments.
I want notes to provide a condensed version of the lecture that I can study from. If the only way to revisit material from the lecture is to sit through the whole damn thing again on video then I've achieved little. Yes, yes, you can jump to a portion, but you're still left wading through a mass of material to find what you want. I want brief concise notes that hit the high points that are relevant to my understanding of the material (skip over bits I find easy, provide elaboration on parts I foubnd more challenging). That's the whole damn point of taking notes; and those notes are the whole damn point of going through the lecture.
Parent
Re:Are you guys mad? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to say this on Slashdot... but have you tried.. : gulp : Microsoft Word? At least on the Mac version, it has this great feature... It records audio while you're taking notes, and next to every line of notes is a little speaker icon. If you click the speaker icon, it starts playing starting at the point you added that line of notes. It's great for just writing down the basic concepts, and then jumping through the audio to get the detailed lecture.
Parent
So do I (Score:4, Informative)
Another data point... (Score:4, Informative)
I teach math at a university. In the last 10 years, I've only had one student who tried to take all her notes with a computer. This is her third time taking the course. Coincidence?
Pencil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's erasable. Use a hard (light) pencil to avoid smearing, or recopy later.
Also, not having a laptop discourages you from checking email, facebook, or playing games.
Re:Pencil. (Score:5, Interesting)
But with a real tablet computer and a stylus (e.g. Lenovo x-series tablets), in addition to erasing you also get a pencil that can cut & paste, resize, move, add space in the middle of the page, highlight, color, change the color of already written text, and annotate pdfs (in case the lecturer hands out slides in pdf format), and undo.
It's called Xournal [sourceforge.net]. I frakking love it. Completely changed the way I work. Now I don't have to carry a backpack full of printed articles.
I also use Zotero [zotero.org]. It's a bibliographic database add-on for firefox, and it will store full-text pdf's. If you set up xournal as your default pdf viewer, you can annotate and store the annotations for papers. So I no longer carry any printed paper or notes anymore.
If you're in science or engineering and deal in diagrams, equations, and journal articles, this beats the crap out of paper & pencil.
I hope to see more real tablet computers this year. Everyone has decided to stop manufacturing tablets with high-resolution screens, and use wide screens too, which means in portrait mode your tablet is blocky (can't read subscripts of equations) and too tall (because it's 16:10 rather than 4:3). So while the iPad sucks on all the above points, I hope it spurs some new & interesting tablets this year. Pen input (wacom) also needs improvement, especially near the edges of the screens where precision is lost.
Parent
Notebooks + paper are the key (Score:4, Interesting)
Notebook and Webcam/Camera Phone and OneNote (Score:4, Informative)
Offer to share the information with your prof or student teacher and they will usually give you the green light or become the note taker for the class (some schools have them for hard of hearing/deaf students - R.I.T. [rit.edu])...
If you use something like MS OneNote [microsoft.com] you can drop all these separate pieces onto the note pages and keep them better organized. Text, your notes, the sound clips, and the diagrams...
At My University (Score:4, Insightful)
I do _everything_ with pen and paper. (Score:4, Funny)
Why, I wrote up this very comment with a quill pen on foolscap before having my secretary type it in to this new-fangled "analytical engine" thing.
Pen and paper (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of thinking "how could I use a digital device to take notes?" you should ask yourself "why do I want my notes to be digital?". Myself, I rarely feel that need as I mostly take notes to study from (less important) and stay awake at lectures (more important). Neither of these reasons require notes in the form of computer files.
On the other hand, you could easily think of several other uses for digital notes. You can share them with friends. You can upload them to somewhere, letting the whole class benefit from them. You can copy them easily. You can store and arrange them easily. You can send them to people on the other side of the Earth, should you want to. But do you want to? That's the question you should answer before making the switch.
short hand + paper/pen notetaking (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been out of a college class for a few years, but I simply would and still prefer paper/pen. It's not about being old school, but I am extremely picky about what I want technology doing for me. I tend to be uncompromising and really think out what some input device will do for me. I want technology that works the way I do, not me having to compromise heavily in order to use it. I have yet to see something that fits the flexibility of pen/paper while giving me the advantage of a digital device thought those electronic note taking pens are probably close.
I can tell you me typing for an hour on a netbook would lead to uncomfortable typing, as netbooks have too small a size. I could probably swing a regular sized laptop like my 15" Macbook Pro, or other similar full size key laptop.
I also have my own short hand method of note taking, coupled with identifying things that I don't need to memorize and things that have to be written down. Also I tend to circle important bits of information and tie them together with arrows pointing to what they relate to creating a type of cluster diagram meshed in with regular note taking. I don't see how any laptop software out there can compare there.
I am hopeful that a well thought out, well implemented tablet PC comes along that gives me good flexibility.
That said I can imagine taking my ipod touch or other such small form tablet device and scribble or look up some info on it while I take notes with pen/paper. As I was thinking about this I considered an iPhone or other similar device being indispensable, since you can take a photo of the board if there is a complex diagram, and simply drop a note on paper (see iPhone pict for blah diagram). ;-)
Why do we even take notes? (Score:3, Insightful)
I graduated 3 years ago, but it bothered me immensely when professors would write things on the board that weren't duplicated in the course notes. It was just a lazy way to enforce attendance. I always learned better out of books than by listening to someone, so sitting around in class just to transcribe felt like a waste of time.
So this whole issue of not having diagrams or about which device to use seems like a manufactured problem. Putting a PDF on the course website with all the diagrams and text would render it moot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For shame that professor not taking all the notes for you. Christ you're spoiled. Books are the just basis, instruction fills in - unless you went to a crappy school, with crappy instructors. Three years out of school. So sad. So much more to learn.
This whole discussion is pointless. People lea
Re:Why do we even take notes? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have never had a student pass without regular attendance. I've taught at three public universities, two private colleges and physics at one public community college (so I think my student demographic has been quite diverse).
I did not REQUIRE attendance to pass, nor link grades/points to attendance in any, way shape or form. Scores/final grades were 100% performance based.
I only rarely lectured on material not in the text book, though I often presented the material differently than the text presentation.
As I told my students on the first day, "I don't care if you learn it from me, the book, your room mate or who ever, if you can do the work, you'll pass."
Generally, the people who did not attend regularly scored in the teens on the tests, or even single digits, on the tests.
Parent
Depends on the class (Score:3, Insightful)
Within the computer science realm, I found there were two major lecture methods being used. The first and most common was a lecture based off of powerpoint slides and the slides are almost always available in advance. Those classes are easy because you can just print the slides (or view them on your notebook) and just take some small notes on the few things not covered in the slides.
The other major method was usually for the more mathematically oriented classes and involved seeing hand-written proofs, equations and diagrams. I think the best method was to use pen and paper to write things down. Then, the next day I transcribe those notes into a LaTeX document. Transcribing makes you go back and follow through all the math and you can take your time to make sure it looks nice. I then study off of the electronic version (which I call my cheatsheet).
As a side note, I always recommend making cheatsheets for every class. It isn't that you actually cheat, but you say if I were going to cheat, what would I want to have with me. It forces you to concisely summarize the class in a small space and is very useful and forces you to go beyond just tryng to memorize things.
The dangers of distraction... (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like the optimal division of time and one that keeps classroom discussions relevant. It also means that not having laptops and cell phones can actually make for a better overall experience.
Let them be distracted, it's their choice (Score:5, Insightful)
For pity sake, let the student be responsible for their own learning. If they want to use a tool to do it they should be permitted to. At university level, and I'd argue earlier, the student is responsible for learning. If they don't want to learn and are so easily distracted, let them be. That is their choice. Banning an item that might help a student who is there and wants to learn so that a lazy student that doesn't care is not distracted is completely irresponsible. If a student is intent on being distracted they can always do something that doesn't require a computer, like doodle, or even something that you can't prevent like daydream. There are only a couple of exceptions. If the student's distraction becomes disruptive or distracts others (for example a noisy keyboard that prevents concentration) that the lecturer should step in. If the tool interferes with assessment. (eg. Internet in a closed book exam) it should not be permitted (but then I consider closed book exams archaic).
When I lectured part time a lot of lecturers were having trouble with students talking through the lecture. I had a simple approach. I stopped talking if I was being talked over. It worked really well. I treated the students as adults and I gave them respect. I expected the same in return. If they didn't want to be there they were free to leave.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen. Cater to the students who are there to learn and let them use their tools as long as they're not distracting others. Ignore the rest.
the best way, IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
I take the notes with a pen and paper and also record everything with a voice recorder. Since I'm taking mostly math courses, it works out quite well. I focus on writing the formula with annotations, and then when the lecture is over, I reconstruct the whole thing. The annotations help to connect the voice recording and my scribbles. That takes some extra time, of course, but the end result is detailed lecture, with everything on a blackboard carefully reconstructed. As a last shot, I typeset the whole thing in LaTeX (if I have time).
I think, if you start using computer (tablet or whatever), you won't have the ``instant connection to the recording media" that pen and paper provide.
As a side note, my favorite professor normally creates some handwritten outline of the lecture, but all the proofs and staff he does on the fly. By accident, while talking to him, I've mentioned I have recorded and typeset his lectures. He looked at them and liked them so much he asked me if he can use them as a supplementary material for his course(s). I didn't mind at all, of course.
Don't take notes during lectures (Score:3, Insightful)
Notes should not be taken during lectures. Take notes while you do the readings. All you have to do is note any interesting anecdotes, and record examples, as they often appear on the tests with little change.
Decades later, I still remember watching my classmates furiously scribbling stuff in calc class as though they'd never heard of this stuff until moments ago, while I sat back, relaxed, yet confused... And then suddenly realizing, they probably had never heard of this stuff, because they did not read their textbook...
Even in those fluffy politically correct liberal arts classes, you can pretty much guess what the lecturer is going to talk about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why were you taking courses that you already understood?
Pen and paper, all the way! (Score:3, Interesting)
The best datum I can offer is a course I took a few years ago on error control coding.
Each week the prof got somebody to volunteer to take very good notes, type them up in LaTeX, then he would distribute them to the rest of the class for reference. The "scribe", as he called the role, got extra credit. The week I volunteered to be scribe it took 8 hours to turn 2 hours of lectures in to something presentable and machine-readable. This included 28 diagrams in Xfig, plus numerous equations.
I started a night school course last week (private pilot ground school, if you're curious). My notes are by hand, plus some highlighter work in the textbooks. I haven't the slightest interest in transcribing them. Why would I? They're my notes, written by me.
Old-tech really is the best tech some times.
...laura
more useful for recopying notes to digital form (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a big fan re-writing notes, it forces you to re-examine the stuff that didn't totally sink in
during lecture. Rewriting them in digital form makes it that much more portable, cleaner, and
you can bring your friends up to speed faster. Engineering notebooks (wire bound) plus a good
mechanical pencil was what I settled while I was an engineering student. Couple re-writing
the notes in digital form with a audio recording of the lecture and you're golden. Alternatively,
you can scan your notes in and then annotate them.
Tablet computers were always good for homework.
Re:Notes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Professors should post their slides on the web, and students should spend their time listening, thinking, and asking questions instead of writing. Anything less and students become mere stenographers, only retaining long enough to commit to paper.
In my case, my understanding and retention of the material was always aided in taking notes during the lectures. And what if he's covering stuff not in the book? Without notes, you'd better have a photographic memory.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Since I don't have mod points and can't mod you up, I'll just beg somebody else to do it.
There's a camp of people that believe the role of a teacher is to pour information into student's flip-top heads. In this case, teachers are expected to produce lots of artefacts like slides, notes, even videos of lectures. Students have to just sit there and pay attention. Later they might be asked to regurgitate something in a test, which ostensibly serves as a measure of how much was learned.
Another camp believes lea
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup, best way to learn I have found, even in 2010.